[101914]

This comment validates all the time I have "wasted" reading HN over the years.

It does not suprise me that something so simple would be so well overlooked (or, at least, "forgotten"). I wonder if I ever would have figured this out from my own readings and experiments. Doubtful.

Great tip!

[userbinator]

I figured it out before/without exposure to that document, but I attribute it to the fact that I started teaching myself at a time when octal was more common amongst mini and micro-computers; most programmers these days barely know any number base other than decimal, and of those who do, binary and hexadecimal are likely far more familiar to them than octal. The official Intel/AMD manuals make no reference to octal either, using only binary and hex.

As an aside, ARM opcodes are (mostly) hex-structured with 4-bit fields, while MIPS, POWER, and SPARC are not amenable to any standard number base except binary (5- and 6-bit fields.)